[00:01] Welcome to The Focus B Show, where Katie Stoddart high performance coach, interviews experts around the world in performance and mindfulness. Now, here's your host. Katie.

[00:34] Welcome to a brand new episode of the Focus B show. Today's topic is on the planning fallacy. So the planning fallacy is that you believe that certain tasks will take you 2 hours and they end up taking you four 5610 hours. This happened time and time again and can be a great source of frustration and can also slow down your business or your work. And it can have all sorts of consequences, especially if you believe you can do so many tasks or activities one after the next. And if your first task takes a lot longer, then it impacts the rest of your day, the rest of your week, you can't meet deadlines and it can cause a lot of stress in your life. So how can you avoid the fallacy? How can you avoid this? And how can you instead have realistic goals, expectations around how long a task may take? First of all, the number one tip that can really help you is to track how long you spend on different activities. You can use this in an Excel sheet or Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar, and this means that after each task, write down how long it took you from nine to eleven or from nine to ten, and try and be as realistic as possible. The idea isn't to lie to yourself, to feel better, but to have a clear indication of how long it takes. Of course, to do this. I highly recommend, and I've spoken about this many times before, to single task and only do one task at once and not do too many tasks in one go, because then you'll be able to see more accurately how long this task will take. For example, if you're writing a work document that you need to hand in, but you're constantly checking emails at the same time and writing on Slack, then maybe that document will have taken you 3 hours. But in fact, actually writing the document took you one and a half or 2 hours. So I invite you when you're time tracking to really be thorough how long was spent on writing the document, how long was spent on checking emails on Slack, and then how long again on the document. If you were only going to implement one tool from this video or podcast episode, it would be this one. Because by being really clear on how long a task or activity is taking, this will really give you a lot more data for the future and help you to understand roughly how long you spend on different tasks. So that's the number one way that you can use this and you can implement this to avoid the planning fallacy. The second is to, instead of planning in a really optimistic way, how long you want to spend on a task, try thinking about the best and the worst case scenario. One way you can do this is when you're using time blocking or time slotting, which is putting these blocks of times in your calendar to allow a room and a window. For example, if you think that writing this report will take you an hour, then why not just put half an hour before or half an hour after? This allows a bit of room and a bit of flexibility. Maybe you'll surprise yourself and write it in 50 minutes. Great. And then you can decide to do something else in that next half an hour, or it will take you an hour and a half or longer. So looking at the best case scenario, the worst case scenario, and then maybe you get a good idea again, it will really help you if you review at the end of the day or the end of the week how long these tasks actually took. Because the best way to learn is to see, in reality, were your expectations aligned with what actually happened? So if you expected it to take 1 hour and it took three, what happened? And then you might also want to see what parameters affect this. So is it because you're waiting on other colleagues to answer, so it's waiting for them? Is it because a bug happened? If you're in a technical field and the software crashed and you had to repair all of that, was that what impacted the delay? Or is it something else? Your creativity was blocked, your energy was lower, whatever it is, because this will help you to understand how often, for example, do bugs happen, and so how much you need to anticipate for this and how likely it is that the next time you have a similar task, it will also take longer. And the last way you can actually avoid this planning fallacy. And there might be a lot of other ways, but the last one for today's topic and episode is to ask someone else. So when you're discussing or reviewing or looking how you're going to plan your week, then ask a friend, a colleague, your partner, someone, and ask them, do you think this is realistic? And they might challenge certain aspects. They might say you're not allocating a lot of time to this specific activity and then it will help you to reflect. Maybe you can explain, oh, I've done it lots of times before, it doesn't take me that long. Or you might say, well, actually, you might be right, I need to allocate a bit more time on this. So you want to maybe have an external perspective if you feel the time and time and time again you're planning for something and it's just taking you too long. So those are the three main tips. Review, ask someone else, be really clear on is it the best or the worst case scenario and how it evaluates compared to maybe the end of the week when you review this once more, the best way to gain clarity on how long different activities take you is by reviewing, is by tracking your time and your activities. And I know this might sound a bit complicated or annoying at first, but it's really simple. Once you're in the habit at the end of your morning, or at the end of the day, or at the end of every activity, you quickly fill in all the blocks how long it took you. I also color code them, and then I can see at the end of the week how long I've spent in calls, how long I've spent on content creation, how long I've spent on communication, business strategy. And this also helps me to have a nice overview of how I spend my time and what I could perhaps change or implement. I know this might sound a bit OD for those of you who aren't used to doing it at all, but this has been one of the things that has most transformed my productivity and my performance, has been to evaluate how long do tasks actually take. And this means that when I plan, I can plan in a realistic way. And I don't have that feeling of disappointment at the end of the day when you haven't achieved everything you set out to achieve. So these are the main ways that you can use to overcome the planning fallacy. I hope this is useful for you. I hope that it helps you to transform your productivity and to not get behind on all your tasks and activities. Please put in the comment what was most useful for you, or if you've got anything to add, maybe a tool or tip that you've been using that has helped you. That's always wonderful to hear. Please subscribe to my YouTube channel and share this video with a friend or a family member if this is useful for them. Thank you so much for tuning in today. Thank you.

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